The Production Guide
Script To Screen: Matter of Life and Death
by Martin Willey

Script To Screen

• Siren Planet
• Shooting script
• Call sheet Interrogation
• Call sheet Planet
• Call sheet Hurricane
• Call sheet Autopsy

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Wednesday 30th January 1974 was the 13th and last day of filming for Matter of Life and Death, and it needed an extended day, running into the evening, to complete the shots.

These shots in the travel tube must come from Wednesday 30th January. This is probably the landing party entering the travel tube to go to the planet, with the binoculars and case. Cameraman Neil Binney is behind Landau. The mannequin is a stand-in dummy, used to fix the lighting before the actors take their places (more commonly the major stars had real people as stand-ins). The hood of Koenig's commlock is the right way round (as it was in the Bergman's lab set); on the planet (filmed earlier, on Wednesday 23rd) the hood is reversed.

The scene was filmed but apart from the sign nothing of it remains in the episode. Publicity photos show it following the stage directions, except there are 2 orderlies, Chris Williams and Saad Ghazi, the same orderlies we saw at the start of the episode (filmed immediately before this shot). "Dead Lee Russell" is played by Mike Stevens, who can be seen in one of the shots. The Autopsy scene is continued immediately after this. Note that the Autopsy door in the corridor set is where the travel tube normally lives, and we can see the corridor set through the open doors, so we are probably on stage H for these corridor scenes as well as the autopsy set.

Camera tracks a sheet-covered body stretched out on a trolley.

ANGLE WIDENS.

We see an Orderly pushing the trolley along the corridor.

Trolley comes to a pair of sliding doors and pauses. The doors open and Camera holds as the trolley is pushed through.

The doors slide back and we see the legend AUTOPSY ROOM.

The final corridor scene is 47A, between Koenig and Helena discussing the pilots Parks and Bannion waking up (see script pages here). At the end, Bergman appears on the communications post and calls Helena to his lab. There is one photo of this cut scene, with Helena and Koenig walking in front of a door marked "Care Unit" (a single door which doesn't match the interior double door of the Care Unit set).

An earlier scene, 38B, shows the two orderlies delivering the body to the Autopsy Room. This follows on directly from the corridor scene 38A shown above; both scenes were filmed and photographed, but cut from the final episode.

In scene 55A, Mathias and the nurse (Anton Phillips and Dorothy Ford) prepare to perform the autopsy on the body (still Mike Stevens). Publicity photos show stunt arranger Alf Joint (Steiner in Breakaway). Doubling for Anton Phillips is Paul Weston (a security guard in several episodes, he had just doubled for Koenig in the rockfall). The nurse is played by stuntwoman Dorothy Ford (who doubled for Helena when she is thrown back in the Care Unit, earlier in the episode).

Publicity shots show Alf Joint talking to director Charles Crichton with the trampoline that Paul Weston will bounce off; Weston and Ford also wear jerk vests, with hidden cables that pull them back,